


Winner's Casino

by skcm



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Detectives, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Road Trip, Alternate Universe - Western, California, Deserts & Desperation, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, M/M, Nevada, Non-Chronological, The American West in all its misspent glory, Vignette, Where America goes to die
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-27
Updated: 2016-02-10
Packaged: 2018-05-16 15:39:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 2,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5831209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skcm/pseuds/skcm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stay the hell away from Nevada. It'll draw you in. You'll die a spiritual death and wake up on the floor of a room at Whiskey Pete's still wondering how the fuck that miner got a castle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dethagon Drive

**Author's Note:**

> A scummy cross-state Western U.S. casinoverse about people who don't fit & thus told in parts that don't fit either. No chronology, no rhyme or reason, everything is short and everything hurts. Kylux here & there, primary ship.

Sloane, Nevada looked exactly as dead as it did last time. The VW Vanagon (Phaz insisted it was named _Dethagon_ ) passed it on the same side and none of the passengers, Phasma or Ben or Hux, wondered why the prison city wasn't really much of a town at all but a couple sincere if crumbling facades of buildings no one named.

The I-15 was never less remarkable than every time, every trip. At least they got to gawk at Whiskey Pete's and reminisce about the shitty roach rooms with rusty shower fixtures until the conversation swerved again, into why the fuck a drunk miner owned a castle and whether they'd take a leak at the McDonald's or at Pete's on a dare.

"I'd have to be stoned out of my mind to piss in the state of Nevada _at all_ ," said Hux.

Ben shot Hux that infuriating sealed lip smile. "You live in Nevada."

"I live in hell," Hux corrected, eyes on the road and not Ben as the distance between Whiskey Pete and the Dethagon grew.

"Hell, N. V.," Phaz explained to no one who didn't already know it.

She made them listen to the same shitty cover of _Viva Las Vegas_ on repeat all the way from Barstow to Primm, which was when the knotted auxiliary cord crapped out and it was talk radio roulette until they finally pulled into the parking lot of Winner's Casino.

Tucked into a corner of North Las Vegas that looked like any other strip mall suburb hell, Winner's was pretty clean on the outside, at least. The parking lot was the only thing about the casino that wasn't stained though, because there were never any cars there in the first place to leave behind huge Rorschach greaseprints.

Under no trees, surrounded by no mountains, the VW Dethagon was proud and lonely.


	2. Sours

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hux is the mouse.

Halfway to Reno, they stopped at Eddie World and loaded up on a couple cartons of cheap cigarettes and a white paper bag of stale pecans, exhumed from the five-year grave of an open barrel, two sets of nuts in a row, like a stand-off with a mirror.

Except Hux, too good for pecans and definitely not a nut either, by his standards, who was at the register with six bags of cherry sours he scored on his dad's credit card. The guys at Eddie World never checked for ID on credit transactions. Honestly, no one at Eddie World gave a fuck about anything, and no one who showed up to the little pit-stop to buy cigarettes knew who Eddie even was. Probably some dead guy.

It's always some dead guy, like Finn.

"Finn liked those," Ben said to Hux. He shook off the shadowy apparition vibe he was giving off with his breath all over Hux's neck, but it took a few seconds for him to step anywhere but right _there_. Hux's transparent hairs stood like fucking spines on an opossum or a hedgehog or whatever inconsequential roadkill he suddenly felt like.

"Fuck off, Ben. I'm paying." Words came easier when he wasn't twitching, and there they were going nowhere, so maybe the stuff between the tread of Ben's metaphoric tires was just a shaky ginger mouse.

"I'll front you next time."

"Like hell you will."

"Yeah, like hell I will. I'll get you so many of our dead best friend's favorite candy you're shitting red for weeks."

"Can you stop reminding me Finn's dead, Ben? It's been a long drive."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> finishing my chapterspree and getting to work on more after #3 rolls around.


	3. Pete's Part One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No one should stop at Whiskey Pete's. Not for any good goddamn reason.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some nsfwish stuff other than my rampant swearrative.

At first Hux didn't feel anything but his own teeth against each other like bones slammed on a sink or toilet bowl over and over until they shattered into brilliant big shards the way lightbulbs do, but the room they got was all residue and stains. When he finally noticed something else, it was the distinct, nerve-wracking sensation of some other skin on his.

"Damnit, Ben." His teeth were still screaming against his own motherfucking teeth.

Ben ran his fingers down the line of Hux's jaw, wrapped all around him like an ugly, skin crawling sort of sweater, some Secret Santa reject gift. Hux clenched and unclenched what felt like his entire damn body the deeper the pressure ran against the hinges of his jaws. It was a car wreck, further dissonance, further gritted bone, further agony.

Fuck no, it was amazing, and that meant it absolutely had to stop.

"You're tense." Ben was apparently the second coming of some overrated psychological pioneer now, as if stating the obvious warranted this bullshit condescension. What was it, a chat between friends all over again? Hux already knew his only real friend was dead and buried.

"Of fucking course I'm tense." Hux's jaw popped against Ben and his solution to discomfort. "What is this, a goddamn massage?"

"Yeah, maybe. If you want it to be one." Asshole.

"What I wanted was a bed with clean sheets and to not have to piss in an actual _room_ at Whiskey Pete's. Inside Whiskey fucking Pete's, Ben."

Hux traced figure eights with his eyes over all unsightly splotches of rust, damning them to some eternity of cleaning products, of lemon, of mint, of bleach. Every corner of the shower had these brown blobs from what he could see. The tub was yellow-ringed. The sink was yellow-ringed. The toilet was yellow-ringed, all these infinite loops in the color of desert death.

That was when Hux realized he hadn't even stepped under the running water yet.

"For fuck's sake, Ben."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's so much awkward sex to come. i should change the rating.


	4. Pete's Part Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hux needed to wash everything about Ben out of his hair, off his body, but it would've been better if there was something to show for it other than a skincrawling cringe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> totally nsfw. just a heads-up.

The bed sounded like sighs and felt like aches, the disinction between agony and ecstasy exactly the same as any other too-close concepts in how seemingly stupid they were, just musical cues in a movie that felt too right, too on, but the strings could sing anyway. Hux, half-dried knees like white knuckles and raindrop hair, couldn't fathom being present if he tried. His mind was cinematic. Anxiety wove around, laces that made him stock straight-backed, a gun barrel posture, some antique musket that belonged to a man who didn't even kiss Ben and probably won't.

It would be a slaughter. It would be too kind.

Hux was terrible that way.

"Why the hell did we go to L.A. again?" He bit the tip of his own tongue to curb that starved, stoned rant. Instead Hux studied the human wreck beneath him like he was a beautiful experiment, moles on his ass and one t-shirt tan arm from the back seat, where he rested and loomed and never drove, but always had some fucking opinion.

Out of the spiral, Hux wanted to scream that he was a good driver.

Agony was one thing, but need was another, and maybe Hux needed that massacre after all.

Ben flopped onto his stomach, faraway. The bed lurched with metal clicks, shotgun cocks. "To watch it spill out the sides of a real city." What a fucking poet.

Hux ducked away into words that became touch when they tasted more like that dire, intrinsic tie they always felt, like vagabond and tired wanderers colliding where they shouldn't. "Vegas is not a real city, Ben. We have no fucking frame of reference for cities anymore."

On top of unwashed sheets that smelled stale when Hux was too close, when his mouth was finally occupied, tongue unbit, Ben was Los Angeles, spread and spilled flesh out the sides of fingers that left marks, and he was worthy of being searched or loathed or resented.

"Back up a little." Hux was all breath and the bed was soaring artillery, more creaks and cries and then Hux was momentary and mindful as Ben became the creaks and cries.

Nothing stopped until it did, when Ben couldn't even work his hands anymore, and Hux's jaw was sore again. A massage would have been good right now.

Good, which neither of them were. Ben collapsed. Hux felt the swell of inadequacy, or it was his cock or something, and he acknowledged that Ben was just a fuck up who smoked too much weed and couldn't come tonight if his life depended on it, if he was at gunpoint.

Hux needed to wash everything about Ben out of his hair, off his body, but it would've been better if there was something to show for it other than a skincrawling cringe when he needed a shameful minute to climax and spill over that dirty quilt, probably cum-soaked anyway. One more for the collage, one more gun that should have been raised to his head but fired away, fated to land unlonely on paisley fabric.

Everything was disgusting.

They lay a foot apart and shared a cigarette and a bag of cherry sours in the sick goddamn room at Whiskey Pete's that smelled like the filthy, dehydrated ghosts of the desert, while the bed still creaked. The no smoking sign on the door was cracked, peeled anyway, so the cigarette didn't matter, and neither Hux nor Ben could figure out why that miner with a ballsack for a chin had a castle, still, but they lost no sleep over it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i feel really compelled to write kylux being incapable of good sex, but at least they'll try and try and try until they can't, right?


	5. Traders

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Indignant (Phaz had a way of ducking out to save herself and barge in wasted and made of flames, screamsinging Elvis in the way of The Drums From Mount Eerie), Hux really just needed warmer food. Anything heat. Beating suns. Scrambled eggs, scrambled brains.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a car and two exchanges.

Finn didn't mind summer in the city of wax-winged angels at all. The sky and sun came out in between buildings, in small places, and when he got to the club, everything was lower and seen. Something about Hollywood was right and destined, and there were book bins and fry vendors and tiny clubs further East of it where he could make people laugh.

The Craigslist-crap Isuzu Trooper (dirty, white, and named Soul Mate, Finn ever hopeful) that he barely owned ('Poe Dameron,' the papers read) was bullied in a past life, so he held back when he drove, playing soft music that twisted into abstract dreams. He ate shoegaze like something candied and spicy, tiny nibbles of hot ginger or something fresh, mango doused with chile.

-

Hux threw up all morning. When he stopped screaming in chunks, they went to the IHOP.

Ben sucked Hux's dick in the bathroom, because neither of them were stoned enough to think more about cities than each other.

It was acceptable. It was a little loud. It might have been too much, but everything felt like fuzzy noise in Hux's ears. Ben slammed the stall door, watched Hux leave first, and wiped a little of him off the corner of his mouth. They shuffled, a quiet forced march back to their food, and Hux rubbed Ben's linoleum pressed knees under the booth. With one hand, he forked at microwaved hashbrowns.

"Where's Phaz? Did she text you or anything?" Indignant (Phaz had a way of ducking out to save herself and barge in wasted and made of flames, screamsinging Elvis in the way of  _ The Drums From Mount Eerie _ ), Hux really just needed warmer food. Anything heat. Beating suns. Scrambled eggs, scrambled brains.

"No."

"I bet she's still in Pahrump. I bet she has the fucking van. I can't even believe she hangs out at the Chicken Ranch. The real one, airlifted or whatever the hell they did to get it from Texas." Something in Hux jostled and became the turned stones of nerves, exposed. Ben jiggled his knee under the coldest hand, prophetic motion, all signs and symbols of the unsaid.

"Sounds like a myth they spread around to sell more blowjobs."

"...Probably."

All sex was an exchange, though, a give and take and a frantic dance.

-

Rey was edges, abyss and screamchasms, echoes that weren't her own, voices of thousands crawling when feet failed, fumbled, faltered, were unjust and unreliable things. Histories get assembled like mosaics, person after visiting and fleeting person.

She worked at the desk of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, unpaid, and went to Hollywood to dance on polished wood.

"But aren't we all historic in ways we can't imagine, Finn?"

Body and mind unconnected magnets not-tangoing away from each other, she was motion like sex and like being, little inches of her delicately tiptoed.

The points of her stiletto heels could brutalize.

Flamenco night, guitars and stars, dancers drained to dying messiah ways, drenched in sweat, draped all over tablecloths, every person a piece of still lifed fruit. Flesh.

Rey was wax. Rey was melted into cement against some couchcrasher from Vegas. Rey heaved smoky rings, mother birding into Finn's desert throat. He tasted funny, like lemony beer and wheat.

Finn coughed dust storms. "Damn."

Rey smiled into him.

"Damn." Echoed. "That  _ was _ ."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> los angeles is something. finn loves it there. rey accepts it as reality. poe will be seen.


	6. A Firefly Left Only to Die in a Jar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben was at a crossroads in uncountable and invisible ways, playing Robert Johnson licks on a bus bench, frowning at the notion of himself. His untied shoelaces flicked against each other with every sneaker kick to the beat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ripped the title from tom waits, unsurprisingly. holla.

Tangled, Rey and Finn were the sheets around them, valuable to each other and a twopound bag of gems that everyone should have coveted. Rhythm and blues and the darkest depths of humanity, river deltas, they knew it. Rey looked forward but Finn tried to sing songs of the past.

He learned them from Ben, how to fear the future in recitations of hymnal history.

-

Ben had the bloody regret of the blues down in him, as if he'd seen nothing and something and both dazzled him to dance his hands past plains-smooth frets. That guitar left him neverlonesome, a criminal's redeeming lifeline, a godsign at a hanging.

No crowd, no noise, the roads met and bent against the horizon of a place removed so far in its dreamness that the sand was hazy past comprehension.

The guitar was an improper thing with no prestigious reputation, yardsale dingy, made of cheap wood, and birthed by the up and down of a not-suburban block where yards had cadaverous boats hidden behind sheds knee-deep in yellow brush, where grazing horses mimicked decay in the dry air. Ben bought it from a community college teacher who laughed like he never meant it, who taught him the taste of chords, who said the guitar was too small but that he felt it in Ben-- the kind of sickness of outgrowing lovely and little and scratched things.

In his youth, between mountains, Ben had a Casio keyboard and Idyllwild was the sort of place where especially around people, Ben couldn't have been more alone, and prefab keybeats were poor accompaniment.

Ben was at a crossroads in uncountable and invisible ways, playing Robert Johnson licks on a bus bench, frowning at the notion of himself. His untied shoelaces flicked against each other with every sneaker kick to the beat.

Enter the producer, his limo and his sway and the ways he was human enough with ringing boosteps, a combover Satan in a periwinkle suit with glittering words that flashed beside a brokebottle scar down his face, beers, brawls and ancient history. He said he worked with Celine Dion on her stage show, which made Ben play on uncaring, but whispered novelties that stuck between one ear and the other, banana taffy and cherry sours and Hux's cigarette smoky breaths artifacts of the past.

There were justifications exchanged, the sum of which had no meaning until the producer sat down next to Ben. He was short, sort of squinty, and a sudden parallel to Ben, who knew perpendiculars, lived abrasion.

"What's she named? Betsy? Sally?" He jived with Nevada words, schmooze flavored, his sale laughable to anyone else.

Then, Ben looked up and caught the still eyes of the producer's storm. "No. The guitar is called Kylo."

"That's... real nice, actually. Here's my card, by the way." Mr. Snoke was the loudest name on it, some fantasy designation for a man who apparently twisted and turned and took interest and smiled like his teeth weren't planks of gold. "You're good, you sound good, but I can make you _better_."

The sympathy felt dirty and worthwhile. "Kylo _Ren_."

"I'll run it by my guys if you gimme a call. It snaps, it zings, and you might make a few bucks snapping and zinging, you know?" Mr. Snoke winked ugly like dying stars.

"I might." It was only a tentative yes, pleas for a new life around the pull of a fisherman's hook barbed straight into his soul.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> busy busy busy, haven't been able to update as much but there's a hell of a todo list.


	7. Feverpeak

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bad dreams, bad Hux, bad whiskey breakfasts.

Oh, god, how the halls of Ben's dream were decked in dead christmaswrapped candy and the fluff of impossible powdered donut snow, Dethagon through the drivethru window at the Krispy Kreme, reverent of the biggest win in his life, the vigilant victory that never was anything but mindscapes, angular chromeness like gifts unreceived, skincolored lights and bloodcolored dark and the sterileness of inhuman death, streaked red maws and patterned doctoring droids, unpeopleing under steeled, stolen stalactites.

Hux woke him, sore-eye stoned, dancing blue flamehearts up and down and up and down.

"You look like shit." And sweat, and bangs.

"I guess," said Ben, hazy, thoughtveiled, inexplicably torn apart. "I feel like shit too."

"At least you're not crying."

No, never.

"Damnit." Ben heaped and furrowed, all freckled angles sopping and sorry, deadly desolate, silent in arrythmic chorus. Angelic, heavenward, unfair.

"I mean it, asshole. You fucking kick in your sleep while I sure as shit don't rest at all." Hux's cholera cold fingers broke and poked dotted light lines, indecipherable but surgical across Ben's hips, Donner parties through the mountains and stuck and starved. There were no smiles. There was no monkey in the middle and Ben awoke from stillmindedness twice in the moment that passed, afternoon unblearied, cannibalistic and fiercely unhappy.

"Stop talking about me like I'm a rumor."

Not ever.

He unwound into the bathroom. The carpet and the linoleum sandpapered his feet equally and with his back then to the soulless cheaproom mirror Ben sucked whiskey down, desperate and gutwarm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> had a busy week or so, writing's been rough, but i spun a sunburn into a fever dream. p.s. what is the 4th wall hahahaaa

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this to some stuff, but nothing as solid as a rec from [fluorescentgrey](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey). [Destruction Unit - Deep Trip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81fSbAjb_SI).


End file.
